Speaking

Along with a long list of global thought leaders, Nassim will be speaking at this year’s SALT Conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas on the weekend of May 10-13th:

The SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference is committed to facilitating balanced discussions and debates on macro-economic trends, geo-political events and alternative investment opportunities within the context of a dynamic global economy. With thought leaders, public policy officials, business professionals and investors from over 42 countries and 6 continents, the SALT Conference provides an unmatched opportunity for attendees from around the world to connect with global leaders and network with industry peers.

SALT is produced by SkyBridge SALT, LLC, an affiliate of SkyBridge Capital, a global investment firm with approximately $12.6 billion in assets under management or advisement as of January 31, 2016. Unique and forward looking, SkyBridge Capital is a pioneer in the alternative asset management industry leading an evolution in the fund of funds space. SkyBridge has redefined the fund of funds investment model by developing a thematic and tactical multi-strategy investment approach to consistently generate attractive risk-adjusted returns. The firm’s investment strategy is enhanced by their unparalleled access to industry decision makers and global financial leaders – including money managers, economists and policy makers– whose insights are integral to shaping our global outlook and opportunity sets. The firm is headquartered in New York and also has a presence in Zürich, Switzerland and Seoul, South Korea.

Category

Nassim kicks off The Bank of England’s One Bank Flagship Seminar, the first such seminar offered by the bank in an effort at greater transparency:

The first part of this talk – The Law of Large Numbers in the Real World – presents fat tails, defines them, and shows how the conventional statistics fail to operate in the real world, particularly with econometric variables, for two main reasons: 1) we need a lot, a lot more data for fat tails; and 2) we are going about estimators the wrong way. The second part – Detecting Fragility – presents heuristics to detect fragility in portfolios. Fragility is shown to be ‘anything that is harmed by volatility’. The good news is that while (tail) risk is not measurable, fragility is.

Category

Nassim and Paul Wilmott are offering their “infamous” two-day seminar “Quantitative Risk Management: In Theory and In Practice” on March 12th and 13th, in London. Here are the points that will be addressed:

What is risk?

What are fat tails?

The idea of fragility and how to measure it

Size and scaling

The law of large numbers in the real world

What is complexity?

How to price options using different distributions

How to simulate fat tails

How to measure model risk

How not to measure model risk

Sometimes it’s wrong to use probabilities

The concept of delta-alpha

The commonest quant mistakes

The Greeks that give you false hope

Why calibration does not work

The dangers of correlation

The importance of nonlinearity

Volatility nonsense

What commonsense tells you about volatility, and turning that into a model

Why simple models are often the best and why too much math can be dangerous